US Army Sees Twitter As Possible Terrorist "Operation Tool"

Mike writes "A draft US Army intelligence report has identified the popular micro-blogging service Twitter as a potential terrorist tool. A chapter titled 'Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter' notes that Twitter members reported the July Los Angeles earthquake faster than news outlets and activists at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis used it to provide information on police movements. 'Twitter is already used by some members to post and/or support extremist ideologies and perspectives,' the report said. The report goes on to say, 'Terrorists could theoretically use Twitter social networking in the US as an operation tool.' Just wait until the Army finds out about chat rooms and email!"

Comments

Extremist Ideologies don't fit in twitter messages

[billstewart]

As you say, Marx was an idiot - but if you look at him and most "Marxists" of various sorts who follow him, they were really verbose idiots. Sure, Engels got him to fit the Communist Manifesto in a short, punchy document with memorable slogans, but Das Kapital or the Unabomber's 35000-word manifesto were more typical. And most of the Islamic extremists are really verbose as well. Twitter and text messages are simply the wrong medium for ideological extremists to use.

Twitter may be fine for tactical operational messages or for non-ideologicals like gangs - "Lets go kill the Haitians!" fits just fine. Marxists can at least use Twitter to say "Let's go get beer"; even that doesn't work for the Islamics.

Maybe the white-power hate groups could fit their ideology into short messages, if they can type that well, but they're the FBI's problem, not the Army's. And even they'd mostly use it for things like "Goin to Wa||mrt - white sheets are on sale".

Re:Extremist Ideologies don't fit in twitter messa

[Lumpy]

the power of twitter, that is also the power of email, SMS broadcasts, and at least 900,000,000 different ways of communicating via the internet is that agents can all report information in short bursts.

A1: blues are heading west.
A2: greens are heading east. left 3 guards.
A3: target only has 6 guards. places everyone.
A1: in position.
A2: in position.
A3: It is 3:21 right now. Go at 4:10.

Now, this would be outright RETARTED to do this via twitter. Get some used Ham radio handhelds on ebay and use the local repeater for your agents during the event. If you use one of the oddball repeaters like the 1.2ghz or the 220 repeaters no hams would even know anything was going on until it was too late. Most of those repeaters dont even have hams listening 98% of the time and if you comms are very short you're golden. If you're well funded drop a repeater on a hill (that you also bought off ebay) and set up your own system.

It will take at least days hours before anyone reports all the "dirka dirka jihad" talk on some obscure frequency. The feds will probably never detect it, and all the gear is readily available.

Why even waste time with a toy like twitter?